I saw the original A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh recently on the big screen at the IFI. Although I’ve been familiar with the script for the stage play for decades, and saw Glenn Close play a chilling Blanche DuBois in London a few years ago, I hadn’t seen the film in its entirety before, perhaps only catching its grim end on late-night TV a few times over the years.

I was stunned by it, for many reasons. Primarily, of course, for Brando as Stanley Kowalski, and his characterisation of pugilistic un-self-conscious working-class masculinity, straight as a die, proudly eschewing all things effete and affected. At the screening, there were affectionate ripples of laughter in the early scenes, the Dublin audience instantly recognising Kowalski as the archetypal Polish working man, a familiar figure to us now.
Brando’s beauty, his sensuality, his animal physicality, and the extraordinarily explosive quality he gave to Kowalski’s knee-jerk thuggish reactions to all attempts to be tamed and domesticated, are the stuff of movie legend now.
Some commentators describe Kowalski as merely abusive and bullying towards his wife, and portray her as a self-deceiving hapless victim; but what I saw was a couple intensely in love with each other, both of them struggling to keep a firm grip on self-respect in the light of the fact that both were entirely consumed by desire, and exhilarated to be in its thrall. They both continually – and consciously – stoked the fires of passion for each other, and before Stella’s sister Blanche arrived, had learned how to contain its volatile rhythms. Stella’s pregnancy was welcome, a love child, with Stanley acknowledging the natural order of things, but still keenly anticipating being allowed back in again, to light up her orgasmic “coloured lights”. They knew each other intimately, a quality only attained by people who have truly allowed themselves to experience losing all control in each other’s arms.
Along comes Blanche, escaped and escapist, a woman ruined, played by Vivien Leigh, with an abhorrence for the “Stone Age” earthiness of her brother-in-law, and a need to control it. She is full of pretentious notions of civilization and chivalry that offend him greatly, because she cannot accept him on his own terms. She is haunted by the suicide of her poetic husband; in the film she fills herself with remorse because she graphically expressed her contempt for him, just before he shot himself.
In the original stage play, the reason for her attack is made explicit – she had discovered him having sex, with another man. Blanche’s flight from her own sex drive, her unconscious attempt to kill it, manifested in her choosing a man who fitted safe and unthreatening notions of masculinity. Perhaps, the knowledge that her ancestral home was lost due to the philandering of her male ancestors fuelled this contempt.
Her gay husband would never awaken the uncivilized beast of her own sexuality, so she thought she would be safe with him; but his own untameable drives found their expression elsewhere, and her shocking encounter with it unhinges her to the extent that her fantasy world takes over. Like a moth to a flame, she flits from stranger to stranger, condemned to a hellish pathological repetition of her original wound.
Allergy and addiction are two sides to the same coin. But she cannot acknowledge the futility of escaping from desire, cannot acknowledge her own frightening yearning for it, and so becomes stuck in a compulsive pattern of bruising encounters with men. Deluding herself that she is merely seeking kindness, she instead finds herself repeatedly evoking her own disowned and disturbing passion in the men she flirts with, to eventually disastrous consequences, when she dares to tangle with Stanley.
There are interesting parallels in real life to this story. David Niven, when staying at Leigh’s house during the filming of Streetcar, is quoted as having stumbled across Brando kissing her husband, Laurence Olivier, in the swimming pool. Leigh, who was inside the house at the time, seemed to be aware of what was going on, but never mentioned it. She was quoted later in life as saying that playing Blanche “tipped her over into madness.” I imagine that the theme of the play spilling out into her private life, with her much-loved husband expressing exactly the sort of anarchic disturbing sexual energy that so drove her onscreen character to insanity, must indeed have tipped her over the edge.
What is interesting though is that this sort of forked phallic sexuality is not the sole preserve of the fictional character of Blanche’s deceptively sexless sensitive husband, nor just of her beloved husband in real life, the elegant thespian Olivier, but also of the apparent epitome of crude heterosexuality, Brando. The mythology of Streetcar, in its various guises on stage, film and in real life, offer us a truly fascinating insight into sex, in both men and in women.
The film may be dismissed as camp by some, a contrived ironic aesthetic, with a heightened melodramatic overblown style. Blanche may be seen as the campest character of all, if one (mis)interprets her as Tennessee Williams in drag, and her frenzied shady exploits just a sanitised representation of a promiscuous queen seeking love in all the wrong places by offering sex to strange men, and seeking love in return. But to pigeonhole it as mere camp is to miss the point of the homosexual experience, which so informs Tennessee Williams’ writing, and which, in his gifted hand, becomes universal.
When it comes to the often angst-ridden interplay between desire and emotions, the former rules us all, even when we try to project it all onto men, and especially onto queers. Blanche’s fear of sexuality, of human animal instinct, and her futile repetitive flight from it – and Leigh’s own experience of it in her own marriage, and her ensuing madness, are pressing issues for all who seek relationship with men, be they male or female.
Many heterosexual women I know, after love has escaped them, choose to retreat completely from the arena and settle for quiet evenings in in front of the telly, avoiding those who are overtly sexual but content enough to stay asexual in favour of security and stability. Many men I know, when thrown from the horse, saddle up within hours to try to tame the beast again.
The emotional cost of that is what drives queens the world over to sing camp torch-songs, the hurt of it, the trap of it, the agony of it. But I suspect the cost of avoiding desire can be just as corrosive, albeit less dramatic or showy, a sort of gradual deadening. “Desire is the opposite of death,” says Blanche, but one cannot escape either. What Streetcar tells us is that whether we avoid it or pursue it, Desire can drive us crazy.